Legal Question in Intellectual Property in California

Re: Privately-owned Text Made into Law. Copyright?

My first guess at this question is that NEPA requires each adopting municipality to make certain changes such as deleting illustrations, renumbering the paragraphs, etc., and then any re-use of the as-modified version that includes EVERY SINGLE change would then be subject to the fair-use rule. In other words, if someone republished the Millinocket, Maine Electrical Code which was a knockoff of the NEC except for 1,041 Millinocket-specific trivial deletions or modifications, and republished without profit motive but only to show the electricians of Millinocket what the law was, this would be OK.

The purpose of the copyright laws is to insure that the original authors of a creative work don't get ripped off for the benefit of some profiteer. Selling leatherbound copies of Millinocket's code nationally would probably come under close scrutiny and likely would be a violation of NEPA's copyrights. That would be especially likely if the knockoffs were masquerading as Millinocket's version, but were in fact provably taken directly from an upstream version, however closely resembling Millinocket's.

You don't mention the reasons for your question, but if you are planning to go into the Code publishing business you need to have a copyright lawyer examine your entire business plan. I doubt that it will pass muster.